The History and Future of Places – Part 8: The death and rebirth of parochialism

One defining aspect of globalization has been the rapid increase in international and regional mobility, both for business travel and tourism. This is an important change because for much of history most people experienced only a few places in the course of a lifetime. Life was about stability and deep roots. From 1970, the reverse has increasingly become true. It seems that, within one or two generations, depth of place experience has been traded for breadth, in which many different places are encountered briefly. Whether this improves or diminishes place experiences is open to question. On the one hand, brief exposure to a new place can only lead to a shallow sense of understanding or appreciation. On the other, exposure to different cultures is an effective bulwark against parochialism.

The recent rise in mobility has, in concert with rapid urbanization, stretched urban areas outwards into interconnected sprawling megalopolitan regions, memorably labelled “hundred mile cities” by Deyan Sudjic. The built environments of these vast places are formed around a skeleton of expressways, high-speed rail lines, intermodal facilities, distribution centres and airports. Hub airports are especially notable because their immense buildings have no architectural or planning precedents. They are the largest single places, or non-places, in the landscapes of cities.

Another form of modern mobility is migration. In its most common form – movement of people from developing to developed economies – it is necessary to maintain population and economic growth.

A consequence for places has been the creation of new cultures and traditions. This is especially true in prosperous “world cities”, that have become especially attractive for new immigrants. Leonie Saundercock, in her book Cosmopolis II, refers to these as “mongrel cities”. Places that in the 1960s could be considered culturally homogeneous have become complex hybrids, filled with people of different races and religions. In these places, a diversity of identities and heritages are celebrated, often leading to social tensions as local traditions lose their once privileged positions.

This hybridity has a global aspect. Electronic communications and relatively inexpensive air travel have allowed modern diasporas to interact closely with their homelands and with their transnational fellows in other countries. In effect, hybrid places, no matter how geographically separated, are now closely connected. 

Postmodern Architecture and Planning

In the 1970s, architecture and urban planning began to move away from the rectangular, uniform designs of modernism to more decorative ‘postmodern’ forms. In architecture, this involved the use of elements from older building styles, such as pilasters, pediments and colours. In planning, it manifested in ‘new urbanist’ or ‘neo-traditional’ approaches to master planning. The aim of the latter was to enhance place identity by responding to local ecological processes, copying local vernacular architectural styles and creating walkable streets. 

The philosophy of postmodernism may have underpinned a fundamental shift in approaches to how places are made and experienced. The rational school of thinking that has prevailed since the Enlightenment may have run its course. This rational attitude made assumptions about the power of reason and objectivity to reveal truth and reality. It informed the development of science, law, economics, technology, political institutions and placemaking for the last four centuries. In the 20th century, its privileged status came into question.

In a sequence of books on pragmatism and social hope written in the 1970s and 80s, Richard Rorty argued that truth is made. It is what we choose to believe, rather than something naturally occurring or identified empirically. What some consider just and valid can be regarded by others with a different perspective as unjust and invalid. These differences cannot be resolved or adjudicated objectively. Even before that, in 1970, the French philosopher Michel Foucault had described the outcome of the sorts of postmodern epistemological changes underway as ‘heterotopia’: “A situation in which things are placed or arranged in ways so different from one another that it is impossible to find a common place beneath them.”

The rationalist ways of modernity had led to the placeless uniformity of the 1950s and 60s. By 1990, modernity had fully given way to postmodernity. This was evident in the revival of place distinctiveness associated with heritage preservation, new urbanism, mongrel cities and hybrid places.

Foucault, Rorty and others agreed that a loss of confidence in the authority of rationality, objectivity and empirical knowledge would pose problems. In such an environment, what is considered just, true and real becomes a matter of who exercises the greatest powers of persuasion. Proposals to solve social and political problems will inevitably be contested by those who view them from different perspectives. Since 1990, this has perhaps been most apparent in the debate around man-made climate change. More generally, politics has become an increasingly partisan exercise. The advent of social media has created echo chambers. Accounts of the history and identity of places are constructed on the basis of exclusionary, rather than shared convictions.

This all suggests that a fundamental shift in worldview might be underway. The consequences for places are enigmatic. They seem simultaneously to involve enhanced distinctiveness and arbitrary parochialisms.